Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Confederate States Army was established on the 28th of February 1861, when the Provisional Confederate Congress authorized a volunteer force and granted President Jefferson Davis control over military operations. A more permanent regular army organization was passed into law one week later on the 6th of March 1861.
Historians estimate that between 750,000 and over 1,000,000 individuals served in Confederate military forces during the war, with total enlistment estimates ranging from 1,227,890 to 1,406,180. An accurate count is impossible because Confederate records were incomplete and many were destroyed.
The Confederacy passed the first conscription law in American history in April 1862, drafting able-bodied white men ages 18 to 35 for a three-year term. Exemptions included railroad workers, telegraph operators, teachers, miners, and druggists. The controversial Twenty Negro Law, passed the 11th of October 1862, also exempted anyone who owned 20 or more enslaved people.
Most Confederate deserters left to support families facing starvation and hardship as Union forces occupied more Confederate territory. By September 1864, President Davis admitted that two-thirds of soldiers were absent without leave. North Carolina lost 24,122 soldiers to desertion, the highest rate of any Confederate state, and historian Mark Weitz argues the official count of 103,400 deserters is too low.
The Confederate Congress passed General Order 14 on the 13th of March 1865, authorizing the enlistment of enslaved men as soldiers, passing the Confederate Senate by a single vote. Only a few companies were raised in the Richmond area before the city fell. Historian James M. McPherson concluded that no black soldiers actually fought for the Confederacy in any organized capacity before Appomattox.
Princeton historian James M. McPherson, analyzing letters from 429 Southern soldiers in his 1997 book For Cause and Comrades, found that none contained any anti-slavery sentiment, though only 20 percent explicitly stated proslavery convictions. McPherson argued that Confederate soldiers rarely debated slavery because they accepted as obvious that they were fighting to preserve it. Former Confederate cavalry leader John S. Mosby stated in an 1894 letter that he had never heard of any cause for the war other than slavery.